Two weeks ago, we were given an assignment for MHST 537 (Teaching Music History) class: Find a reading outside the syllabus that is connected to prejudice in the classroom, and introduce that reading to the class.

The reading I chose—Strangers From A Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (Ronald Takaki)—is one that was part of the syllabus for a course (“Asian Americans and Education”) I took while at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. That course, the reason I took it, and what I got out of it are posts for perhaps another time. I remembered this Takaki reading because of one particular section titled “The Myth of the ‘Model Minority’” that resonated with post-grad school experiences I’d had. Takaki writes:

Today Asian Americans are celebrated as America’s “model minority.” In 1986, NBC Nightly News and the McNeil/Lehrer Report aired special news segments on Asian Americans and their success, and a year later, CBS’s 60 Minutes presented a glowing report on their stunning achievements in the academy. “Why are Asian Americans doing so exceptionally well in school?” Mike Wallace asked, and quickly added, “They must be doing something right. Let’s bottle it.

[A] Pattern of Asian absence from the higher levels of administration is characterized as “a glass ceiling”—a barrier through which top management positions can only be seen, but not reached, by Asian Americans. . . . Asian Americans complain that they are often stereotyped as passive and told they lack the aggressiveness required in administration. . . . Asian American ‘success’ has emerged as the new stereotype for this ethnic minority. While this image has led many teachers and employers to view Asians as intelligent and hardworking and has opened some opportunities, it has also been harmful. (Takaki, 474-477).

I grew up in a society predominantly Asian and Polynesian, so I was largely insulated from the “model minority” views that Takaki relays. However, while studying for an additional degree beyond my Harvard one, I did encounter some of the reverse racism that Takaki might suggest would come about as a result: That because Asian Americans are perceived as success stories, it becomes acceptable by others to taunt, berate, and bring up Asian ethnicity as a means of “leveling the playing field” for those of other racial or ethnic backgrounds.

Here are a few short anecdotes that I feel relay my experiences:

• At one point, when I was taking a historical survey course (and was doing rather well in it, because of a lot of effort I’d put into studying the material), the instructor insinuated that my success was ethnically based rather than on my skill set.
• Another teacher commonly made analogies that somehow connected musical scores with Chinese menus and Oriental massage.
• I also had new acquaintances remark, “You’re the first Asian friend I’ve had—the others are so nerdy” and “Why are you damn Asians so good at everything?”

Though I wanted to take those experiences and remarks in good faith, I found it increasingly difficult to tolerate and stomach them. While the easiest way to interpret some of these experiences may be as harassment (racial and sexual), I see them as being related to the “Model Minority” syndrome. At no time during these occurrences did I observe members of other minorities or ethnic/racial groups receive similar treatment.

Significantly, Asian-American “success” has been accompanied by the rise of a new wave of anti-Asian sentiment. On college campuses, racial slurs have surfaced in conversations on the quad: ‘Look out forthe Asian Invasion.’ ‘M.I.T. means made in Taiwan.’ ‘U.C.L.A. stands for University of Caucasians Living Among Asians’. ‘Stop the Chinese before they flunk you out.’ (Takaki, 479).

Implications for Classroom Teaching

Clearly, one lesson that I can draw from reflecting on my own experiences is that teachers must strive to be pro-active and conscientious individuals who value objectivity equal to their own interpretation and analysis. Another is that we must always consider what misunderstandings could result from the ambiguities of language and metaphor. I would also argue that organizing coursework and work products in a way that students’ learning processes are most evident can help to counteract any perceived obstacles for students that will come from a variety of cultural, ethnic, racial backgrounds.

As an introduction to what we focused on in class this past week, here’s a project:

Take five stickie-notes and on the first write “beta.”  The second should read “alpha,” the third “theta” the fourth “delta₁” and the last “delta₂.”  Now, stick the first on your forehead; you’re alert, and your mind is working at “beta.”  Walk over to your pensive cat that spends hours every day staring out the window and stick “alpha” on her back.  “Theta” belongs on your son who is staring out of the same window, gathering his thoughts for another painting.  The sleeping dog on the floor gets “delta₁” and your snoring husband should wear the “delta₂.”

 

I’ll explain:

This week we learned that our brains functioning capacity has been categorized into cycles per second.  When we’re alert and actively engaged we’re in a state called beta, functioning between 15-40 cycles per second (cps).  Conversely, in deep sleep (Delta2) our neurons are transmitting information at the rate of only 1.5-3 cps.

 

 

Lyle Davidson said that “Theta is a good place to be,” and decided that we needed to be brought down to the 5-8 cps range right away.  We were asked to sit still and quietly with our eyes closed and allow ourselves to really lean into our chairs.  We were to relax all of our muscles and really let our minds be free.

After five or ten minutes we opened our eyes and shared our experiences.  Some class members shared that they were able to organize their thoughts, allowing distractions to come and go without ever focusing on them.  We were also able to focus on different things in our environment, an example of what attention really is.  Also, we could remove ourselves from the current environment address a bigger issue without the current “brain noise.”

The next time you find yourself in a stressful situation, try theta.  Let me know how it works.

 

Something I’ve noticed outside of NEC

A close friend of mine, a double bassist, is one of the many artists you may find down in the bowels of the city, better known as Boston’s subway system.  If you go to Downtown Crossing on a Friday night you’ll probably see him with this bass plugged into a loop pedal and an amplifier.  He layers loops one on top of the other and then improvises on them, some of the tunes being mellow, others joyful, and he often delves into the realm of raga, which is the genre in which the following experiences occurred.  He moves between arco and pizzacato, and people absolutely love it.

It’s very common for a crowd to build around him, many people staying to watch as two or three of their trains come and go.  Last week I observed a man very interested in the music and exhibiting many of the characteristics and behaviors of a person with mild autism.  He would be silent and introspective, and then would start clapping furiously at some points in the middle of an improvisation.  During the music, after he’d really gotten into it, he was alive in a new way.  It was fascinating; I’d never seen anyone respond that way. 

Last Friday I was sitting on the same bench a few yards from the show and a man sat beside me.  He clearly hadn’t showered in a while and was mumbling to himself in a frustrated voice.  My friend had taken a break and when he started again the man was silent, lowered his head, and began clapping the beat the way a small child would.  When the music reached a place that became really repetitive and, I think, a little boring, the man got up, started mumbling again, and staggered away. 

These people who behave in a way that’s less than socially acceptable have unequivocally positive reactions to the music.  Their behavior moves from one of silence and frustration to a peace and a joy.  I’m sure I’ll have another opportunity to experience someone’s ecstatic happiness inside beautiful music and I’ll be sure to share it. 

I’d love to hear about a similar experience you’ve had, whether it’s a snoring husband or someone being awakened by peaceful tunes.

Learning through Oral History and Morphogenetic Family Fields

In one of our first classes, Warren taught us the first verse of a traditional Indian song. He began the class with a drone and had us repeat vocal warm-ups in order to acquaint ourselves with the intervals in the scale. These fragments were then, piece by piece, combined to form a small melody. At this point, he broke away from the melody to have us repeat 5 or 6 spoken syllables. He then sang the completed piece with the full text and had us sing along when we heard the syllables that we had just learned. Now we had a somewhat ‘fleshy’ skeleton of the piece that we were able to fill out with the missing syllables. After about 10 or 15 minutes the class had successfully learned the verse.)

In our session this week, three of us recollected the song to Krishna that we had learned a few weeks ago while the other five members tried to learn it. This time, though, it only took about 4 or 5 minutes for the class to be able to recite it (as opposed to the 10 or 15 minutes the time before).

This reminded me of Rupert Sheldrake’s studies with morphogenetic family fields. Stated in a question to anthropologist Terence McKenna, a morphogenetic field is “a non-material organizing collective memory field that affects all biological systems. The field can be envisioned as a hyper-spatial information reservoir that brims and spills over into a much larger region of influence when critical mass is reached – a point referred to as morphic resonance.” Basically, one can understand it as a collective memory bank where a species, through adaptation and evolution, stores knowledge that is passed on through future generations of that species. Sheldrake elaborates that

each individual both draws upon and contributes to the collective memory of the species. This means that new patterns of behaviour can spread more rapidly than would otherwise be possible. For example, if rats of a particular breed learn a new trick in Harvard, then rats of that same breed should be able to learn the same trick faster all over the world, say in Edinburgh and Melbourne. There is already evidence from laboratory experiments that this actually happens.

In this case, knowledge is not limited to growth by future generations, but in fact is immediate.

This seems to be evident in our classroom. It took half the time for the class to learn the song when there were members present who had already learned it than it did when none of us knew it. In relation to this, Sheldrake determines that “animals inherit the successful habits of their species as instincts. We inherit bodily, emotional, mental and cultural habits, including the habits of our languages.” This could also go to explaining the pattern of oral history and tradition that makes our species unique. Warren mentioned in class that oral tradition was learning based upon the human love of imitation. I agree with this, but I also believe that, on a similar scale, oral tradition exists because of our innate capability of memory. Sheldrake in fact proposes that memory is inherent in nature. In this way I see oral learning and history as divided into these two factors; imitation and remembrance.

I watched a series of video clips this week on YouTube of Warren and his teacher, S. G. Devasthali, in a lesson (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4qibmXtTN0). The way in which he learned the ragas was similar to the way in which he taught pieces to our class. There was a call and response throughout the lesson, where his teacher would sing a fragment of the melody which Warren would repeat. The fragments were eventually compiled and through this repetition, he remembered them. This is the basis of oral tradition; imitation and memory. Repetition may also be listed as a component of oral tradition, perhaps as a subset of imitation.

It is interesting that, while he worked with our class, the song was essentially shattered in numerous fragments (phrases, pitches, syllables, physical expressions of the mouth, etc.) which we pieced together in a variety of different ways. I could almost envision a matrix of possible combinations, which after a number of these combinations had been tested, an image of the piece as a whole became more clear. It seems to me that this method is effective in that a deeper understanding of the material is achieved, where one not only learns the song front to back, but now knows its inner workings and could perhaps sing it back to front, or even from middle outwards. This also relates to a matrix, lets say in 12 tone music, where all possible combinations are visible at once (all of the inversions, retrogrades, and retrograde inversions for each transposition of the prime series).

Later in the class, we began to learn the second part of the Krishna lullaby. I was reminded of a piece by Milton Babbitt for soprano and piano (or tape) where, in addition to his systems of 12 tone and duration rows, he devised a system where each pitch was assigned a syllable. In this way, the text of the piece emerged from the music or from the system, rather than the music emerging from a set text. For me, this was similar in that learning this Indian song (where my knowledge of the language is next to none), each pitch or melodic fragment was assigned a syllable or, in a sense, a syllabic motif. It is interesting that in this case, in both pieces, there is a supreme unity to the sound. One piece (the one from class) the music emerged from the text, and the other (the Babbitt piece) the text emerged from the music. Either way, both utilizing a language unintelligible to my ears, both pieces felt solid and complete.

-Chris

NewsBlog Editor’s Note: We are pleased to introduce to you Chris Watford, a new CMIE Guided Intern working as Documentation Specialist for Warren Senders’s Cross-Cultural Approaches to Music-In-Education course this Fall. For more blog entries regarding this semester’s run of the course, and previous years’ runs, please click here. 

Hello NewsBlog readers! I am doing a guided internship this semester as a Documentation Specialist for Warren Sender’s course Cross-Cultural Approaches to MIE. My goals are to examine the roles of both teacher and student within a classroom setting and to collect evidence of the way in which both parties learn from each other. I am also interested in observing and documenting various strategies for effective teaching, and inversely, for effective learning.

What’s This Course About?

The course examines, through immediate experience, how people throughout the world intrinsically learn from one another. It also opens the doors to understanding how cultural structures in education shape the way in which we learn and, eventually, how we will teach. We also focus on understanding how to take what a student already knows and use that as a building block for further learning.

In the course of each two hour class, various activities are performed that demonstrate a number of different aspects embedded within the learning process. The class learns traditional Indian songs, builds instruments, practices the teaching of activities to the class, and participates in group discussions that center on our collective observations from previous activities and experiences. After each class, the students are expected to compose a written reflection on their experience and how it relates to what they are doing outside, whether it be performing, practicing, teaching, or just aspects of general living. The idea is that, by the end of the semester, they will have compiled an in-depth ‘syllabus’ that outlines specifically what they have achieved and observed throughout the term (that also makes it possible to read simultaneous reflections from the same class in order to compare our collective learning).

My Guided Internship Plan

Having already participated in and completed this course, I have an understanding of the end product. My plan is to observe the process again from a new perspective and to gather visual, audio, and textual information throughout the term. This will be compiled into a final presentation that focuses on the dynamic between learner and teacher, and stems from the hypothesis that they are both equal and similar parts of the same system, rather than opposing ends. In addition, I will also be exploring aspects of oral tradition along with different ‘cultural’ and scientific approaches to learning (genetic, morphogenetic family fields, etc.).

Warren and I will be collaborating extensively throughout the term in order to produce a multi-media project to encompass the collective learning of the class and to highlight various aspect of effecting teaching/learning. I will keep you up to date with new information and media as each class approaches, so please check back frequently for new posts! I am looking forward to an exciting year!

NewsBlog Editor’s Note: We are pleased to introduce to you Jenny Giardina, a new CMIE Guided Intern working as Documentation Specialist for Lyle Davidson’s Music, Brain Development, and Learning course this Fall. For more blog entries regarding this semester’s run of the course, and previous years’ runs, please click here. 

My generation has been part of the blog explosion, as I like to say.  After being a part of the common social networking sites (names I’m sure I don’t need to list) I am very pleased to now be a part of New England Conservatory’s MIE NewsBlog.  I recently entered into an MIE Guided Internship as a Documentation Specialist and will be providing updates and peeks into the learning going on in Lyle Davidson’s Music, Brain Development, and Learning course.

So far we’ve done a great deal of studying the brain from a biologists viewpoint: the anatomy, neuronal activity, and the physicality of a learning brain.  With the aid of our current text, A User’s Guide to the Brain: Perception, Attention, and the Four Theaters of the Brain by John J. Ratey, M.D, we are being encouraged to delve into our personal questions and curiosities regarding the learning process as relates to the brain, as well as the effects of music on the brain.

Along with this focus we’ve been given the question “what was my best learning experience and why?”  The more we work with this question and our personal answers the more I’m sure that all teachers need to think about personal experiences and be aware of all the possible approaches that could help a person learn in a more complete way.  We’ve all heard the old adage, “Some people learn best by reading, others by listening, and still others by seeing someone do it.”  We’re finding through our experiences in class, our reading and classmate comments that these standard approaches are only addressing the tip of the iceberg. 

My BEST Learning Experience

I spent a semester teaching in a private school last year.  I was the first music teacher they had and the teachers, parents, and most importantly students loved me.  I taught music once a week to all the students one grade at a time.  Not only was this the most rewarding experience of my life, but the most difficult. Throughout the semester I learned more than I ever thought I would from the preschoolers alone.  The challenge was working with such a wide range of age groups—Pre-K through 6th grade.  The most exciting moment was when I had the Kindergartners clapping rhythms from the board.  I first used circles to indicate a clap, and vertical lines for silence.  After a few times through I replaced the symbols with quarter notes and rests.  They couldn’t wait for it to be their turn to come up and put the notes and rests in the order of their choice.  Through this process I found that not only can the youngest students follow what I teach the oldest, but they are more involved, active, excited, and quick to learn the skill.  Looking back now and thinking about what I learned in music at that age I’m almost sure that the music curriculums are nowhere close to the level they can and should be.  These 5 year olds need more.  Much more.

As the Documentation Specialist for my current MIE class I’ve outlined some questions to focus on:

Goals for the Class

• To spark an interest in the class to uncover and experience as much as they possibly can to be part of the final product.
•  To carefully document accurately and thoroughly so that no one is cheated of the priceless opinions and comments of the teacher, students, and authors.
•  To collect and interpret these findings by the end of each week in a way that is easily transferable both in format and language to the CMIE NewsBlog.
•  To encourage my classmates to read and blog on the NewsBlog, both to experience what is being said about their class and to comment themselves.

Personal Goals for the Future

I’ve recently begun research into Music Therapy and find that every page I read convinces me more that I should pursue this field as a career.  My personal goal through this internship is to uncover more information regarding the techniques of this field.  I also hope to answer a few more specific questions:

• What are the proven methods for using music to positively influence the brain with learning disabilities, dementia, or other abnormalities?
• In this relatively new field, what are some of the methods still in the research stage not yet commonly practiced?
• What are the physical attributes of a brain that functions differently than my own?  
• How do these characteristics change during/after musical experiences (taking note of specifics)?
• With the help of my classmates’ individual curiosities, what discoveries will prove to be the most useful to my own inquiries and how can I apply them immediately?

I will be posting weekly with updates of class activities, discoveries and even pictures and hope you will check back to follow our progress. 

Your comments are encouraged, especially those about your favorite learning experience as they can only help us in our learning process.